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of concentration, bliss and exaltation, with a touch of absence, as if her body was there and her mind somewhere else – the expression she wore when she was drawing, lost in the process of creation.
    I had an image of her burnt into my memory – well, I had many, but this one jumped out at me all the time, since she’d been ill – you know when you see something and it sticks in your mind, for some reason? One afternoon I came back from a work trip to London and she ran downstairs from her studio to say hello. She had paint on her face and in her hair, and her fingers were all the colours of the rainbow, and when she threw her arms around me she said, “Today I’ve been painting dragons.”
    That moment stuck in my mind. The way the sun shone in her long hair, the colour of ancient gold, the way she left smudges of paint on my hoodie, the way she smiled, the way her eyes looked full of joy, full of life.
    Yes, that was my Bell.
    And I prayed I would get her back, because life without her had no colour. Not even my music could give me anything more than a temporary respite; it couldn’t save me from the absence of her.
    Once I’d read an article about a whale whose song was on an entirely different frequency from every other whale’s. Because of that, nobody could hear her. She sang and sang, but nobody picked up her voice except cold, soulless human instruments. And so the whale couldn’t communicate with any other whale and she ended up isolated, incapable of sharing in a pod’s life.
    Bell was like that, I thought. She called out the reason for her distress in a frequency that only I could hear. If I stopped listening, she would be all alone. It would be as if nobody could hear me playing the fiddle – as if I played and played, but nobody could hear me at all, or they could only hear squeaks and strident sounds. It would be hell.
    That was the way her life was, but I hoped not forever. I would help her find her voice again, in any way I could. I was afraid, but I had hope, even after what happened. Especially if she had no hope herself – I would be the keeper of her flame.
    No, I would never leave her, certainly not if my mother asked, and not even if Bell herself asked me over and over again to go and let her be, to go and build a home and a family for myself. Because she said that: she said I deserved a family, that I shouldn’t waste my time – her words – with someone like her. When she was really low, she said I deserved a real wife .
    Well, I had a wife, and she was very real. I had a family.
    I had a wife, a family and a home, our whitewashed cottage on the loch shore in my native village of Glen Avich. My wife was a beautiful, talented woman who, one day, went inside the woods and got lost, terribly lost, until she couldn’t find the way back any more. But she would. She would find the way out. And we would all be there for her when she came back: me, and Torcuil, and Emer, and all the watercolours and pencils and unfinished illustrations that lay abandoned in her study.
    One day she would find her way back to me, my Bell.
    There was one thing, though, that I dreaded giving up, even for her: my music. Without it I’m pretty sure I would have lost my mind. The time I spent playing all over the country, all over the world, kept me sane and strong enough to go back to her. In fact, even before her illness, I lived and breathed music – it had always been like that for me. I was sure that if it weren’t for my music, with the way things were, I’d follow her down the black hole she had fallen into.
    I still remember the first time I picked up a violin myself, after hearing my grandfather and then my father playing for years. I think I must have been five years old, and the violin was too big for me to handle – my father crouched beside me and helped me hold it. After that, I never wanted to put the violin down, so I was given